Month: August 2017

Website Analytics is there for retailers to use. You’ve just decided to start an online retail business. Why not? It’s relatively easy and cheap to do. You can start a Drop Shipping business, or join Shopify or trade your own goods online with a Woocommerce site. According to Quora, there are between 12 and 24 million ecommerce websites on the net. However, only about 650,000 ecommerce websites generate annual sales of more than $1,000. That’s a miserable 2.7% generating very modest turnovers.

“Marketing automation is growing – sizzling fast, announced Michael Jans recently in his blog AgencyRevolution.com. In fact, there are eleven times more B-B companies using marketing automation than were in 2011 (VBInsight). Most visible marketing automation for retail customers are chatbots.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with the proliferation of messaging apps, are fuelling the development of chatbots. Artificially intelligent chatbots or conversational agents can be used to automate the interaction between a company and customer.

Even with Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, humans mostly need to make the final decisions regarding which business strategies they will pursue. As result of this, we can’t escape the humanity of decision-making in business environments.

I’m not aware of one retailer that does his/her business without customers. Indeed, retailers that have plenty of loyal customers enjoy a competitive advantage and are doing well. So, how do they do it? Retailers with a clear and effective value proposition at least know who their customers are, what they want and need and why are they coming back. Above all, retail customers can also be found online…